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By Dirk Sutro
Woody Allen has excellent taste in vintage jazz, but he isn’t singlehandedly responsible for the music on the soundtracks of his films including Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days and Everyone Says I Love You. For details, he turns to pianist Dick Hyman, who, according to a profile in Atlantic Monthly, has programmed into his brain “every popular piano and organ style that has ever been played in America.” Hyman, who has fingered the black-and-white 88 on some 1,000 recordings, brings his encyclopedic knowledge of jazz to San Diego November 23. He’ll display many facets of jazz piano as he improvises on great American songs by Gershwin, Porter, Arlen and Berlin at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, presented by the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library.
For Hyman, modern jazz piano has roots in Louis Gottschalk, who in 1863 composed Pasquinade, a piece that combined ragtime’s rolling beat with Latin and African rhythms he’d heard in New Orleans.
“He was a classical virtuoso composer,” Hyman says. “As early as the 1850s, he was writing stuff that sounds as though it was going to be ragtime. He was hearing African-American people in their various expressions around New Orleans, in weekly gatherings at Congo Square, where people danced and sang. I play excerpts from two of his pieces.”
Other vital links in jazz piano’s evolutionary chain include Scott Joplin, George Gershwin, James P. Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller. Piano has been an underappreciated instrument in jazz, compared with saxophone—think Charlie Parker and John Coltrane—and trumpet (Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie). Hyman says the late pianist Art Tatum is particularly deserving of attention.
Not only was Tatum the equivalent on piano of Parker on sax—revolutionizing jazz with new harmonic structures, rhythmic combinations and improvised melody lines—Tatum’s genius also puts him on a par with classical master Vladimir Horowitz, Hyman says. “To me, he was the greatest jazz pianist there ever was.”
Hyman’s most recent release is Cheek to Cheek, named for the Irving Berlin song. It includes several tunes by great American composers, from Thelonious Monk to Cole Porter. The pianist’s broad knowledge of jazz is also accessible on a CD-ROM titled XXX and published this fall by NSS Productions of New Orleans. On it, Hyman talks and plays, but the disc is enriched by layers of information, including film clips of vintage jazz piano performances.
Jazz is largely improvised, which leads some listeners to believe, mistakenly, that the music is completely free and undisciplined. “I think people understand that jazz players make it up as they go along,” Hyman says. “It’s very commonly understood that’s what jazz is about. I’m not sure people understand that sometimes you don’t make it up, that you read music.”
Tracks: It’s as much a part of Thanksgiving in San Diego as turkey—the Thanksgiving Dixieland Jazz Festival at the Town & Country Hotel. More than 11,000 fans of vintage jazz are expected to turn out November 27 to 30 for a lineup that includes some 30 bands and a special “History of Ragtime” performance by New York pianist Terry Waldo. Among bands playing San Diego for the first time at this year’s Dixie fest: Florida’s Rhythm Rascals. Local groups will include the Chicago Six and Tami Thomas
... Ani DeFranco appears at the Spreckels Theater November 7
... Blues guitarist Robben Ford, a frequent collaborator with blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon, who died in September, plays the Belly Up Tavern November 9
... Salsa is the main music at Cafe Seville in the Gaslamp Quarter on Tuesday and Thursday nights.
Three Kings—Albert, Freddie and especially B.B.—are among the more popular all-time blues guitarists. But among living legends, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, whose signatures are a cowboy hat and a vintage Gibson guitar with an electrifying bite, makes a rare connection between blues, country (his childhood in Louisiana and rural Texas) and jazz.
Seasoned blues salt Brown, who appears at the 4th & B nightclub in downtown San Diego November 9, recently has made his most blatant blues-jazz merger. On his new CD, Gate Swings, he bends strings in a big-band context on tunes including Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” and Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump.” Brown’s album—a flashback of sorts to the big-band context he employed for his first recording in 1947—is intended to expose today’s young listeners to authentic swing, at a time when new acts such as Squirrel Nut Zippers are drawing much inspiration from that music.
But Brown, who also plays violin, isn’t confined by musical boundaries. He grew up listening to bluegrass, and counts Texas country kings such as Bob Wills among his influences, as well as Cajun music and other rootsy American genres. At 73, signed to a deal with Verve Records and a recent recipient of the R&B Foundation’s “Pioneer Award,” Brown is in his prime—at an age when many folks are into retirement.
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